Stories

I was watching a documentary about Robert Redford when Robert Redford walked in. He was still dusted over with snow from skiing. In my paint ­covered jeans and beanie, Is howed him around the house. He lifted things gently and asked questions. I answered carefully. ‘Over there is a music box I’ve had since I was a baby.’ He wound the little box, and it played a warbly tune. ‘Here is a stone from the Great Kei River in South Africa.’ He held the stone . . .

The man once had an idea about a birdcage. They were all sitting on the floor of his new house under the paintings of people who were long as shadows, and he signaled it with a hand to the mantel. A thought-cage, he called it, and gave them paper. They sat cross-legged, that night and many others, folding their secrets down until each could be passed through the bars.

Long after her parents’ divorce, when drifting through a convention in Seattle, she would come across a half-melted ice eagle on a banquet table, its wings disappearing, and she would think of the German winter spent with her parents, she would remember the scent of the wild goose stuffed with apples and sage on the table, the way the car had sped over the roadways, how the stars had not moved at all.